Photoshop Selections

Part 3

Type

The Type tool contains a flyout showing a dotted ‘T’. With this tool active, when you type text in the dialog box and hit OK, instead of foreground colored text appearing on your image, the text appears as “marching ants”, or as an active selection ready for your command.

Magic Wand

The Magic Wand sees an image as composed of shades of gray (0-255), even though what you see may be in color. When we specify a number in the dialog box, we are really telling the magic wand how many values of grays to select. The higher the Tolerance number, the wider the range of values that will be selected.
To use the wand, just input a number into the Tolerance dialog box and click in the area to be selected. An contiguous area of color with all of the pixels within the Tolerance limit will be selected. If your selection isn’t quite right, you may have to adjust the Tolerance number up or down, or choose Select>Grow or Select>Similar.
Add non-contiguous areas to the selection by Shift-clicking. The Anti-aliased checkbox is used to select Anti-aliased images (blurred edges when viewed close up, a technique to smooth edges).
The Sample Merged checkbox tells Photoshop to use either all visible layers when making a selection, or only the active
layer.

Color Range

Color Range is very close to the magic wand in effect, but learning to use it is a little more tricky. Select>Color Range will bring up the preview window showing a grayscale version of your image. The Fuzziness slider can be thought of like the Tolerance number of the magic wand: it limits the range of colors selected.
But it will also select the color range sampled with the eyedropper, over the entire image, not just contiguous areas, very much like Select>Similar.
Selections created here are based on all visible layers, so unwanted layers need to be made temporarily invisible by turning off their “eye” in the layers palette. White areas in the preview window are selected and gray areas are partially selected.
To add or subtract a range of color in the selection, use either the + or – eyedroppers, or you can click and drag the plain eyedropper using Shift to add, or Option to subtract. Expanding your options even more, you can use the Fuzziness slider to fine-tune your selection, and you also have the choice of making your selection based on specific colors, or by value: Highlights, Midtones or Shadows.

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